"On Long Island, librarians at public libraries have stocked "Lucky," according to youth services directors for the Nassau and Suffolk library systems. But school libraries are another story. Some local school librarians may not be ordering it, and some experts call this censorship.

Sharon Babcock, youth services director for the Half Hollow Hills Community Library, says she recently heard a Suffolk County school librarian, at a librarians’ gathering at the New York Public Library in Manhattan, say "she would have a problem putting it into their collection." Babcock says she read the book before the flare-up, loved it and ordered three copies.

"It went right by me," she says of The Word. "I wonder, do these people ever put their kids on a school bus? God knows what comes out of their mouths [there]."

Another Suffolk school librarian, who didn’t want her name used, says she probably won’t order it: "We’re very careful about Newbery books, because we’re in a K-6 building" and the Newbery winner is often for older children."

"The word “scrotum” does not often appear in polite conversation. Or children’s literature, for that matter.

Yet there it is on the first page of “The Higher Power of Lucky,” by Susan Patron, this year’s winner of the Newbery Medal, the most prestigious award in children’s literature. The book’s heroine, a scrappy 10-year-old orphan named Lucky Trimble, hears the word through a hole in a wall when another character says he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog, Roy, on the scrotum."

Congrats to Jess on getting a mention in the article, even though her blog is mentioned as an "electronic mailing list". Bad NYT. Bad.